Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Braised Sweetbreads
Braised Sweetbreads
Take six blanched heart sweetbreads, lard the upper parts slightly, and place them in a braisingpan with some slices of fat pork; add half of a sliced carrot, half of a sliced onion, and a garnished bunch of parsley. Sprinkle with a little salt, and cover with buttered paper. Cook them to a golden color on the fire, and moisten with one-half pint of strong white broth; place the pan in the oven, and bake the sweetbreads for forty minutes, basting occasionally with the gravy, lifting the buttered paper, and replacing it each time in the same position. The sweetbreads will now be ready to serve with any kind of sauce that may be desired.
Braised Sweetbreads, Montglas Place half a dozen small sweetbreads in an equal number of small buttered paper cases, having cooked fine herbs strewn over the bottom. Heat it in the oven for five minutes, then pour one tablespoonful of hot montglas over each and serve on a dish with a folded napkin.
Braised Sweetbreads, Pompadour Braise six sweetbreads, pour one-half pint of hot bernaise sauce on a dish and sprinkle with two truffles cut into small pieces, place six artichoke bottoms over the sauce, place a sweetbread on each with a truffle on top, and serve at once.
Broiled Sweetbreads, Colbert Cut into halves three fine blanched sweetbreads, season with one pinch of salt and one-half pinch of pepper and pour over one tablespoonful of oil; stir together well and broil them over a sharp fire for five minutes on each side. Dress on a hot dish, and serve with one pint of hot colbert sauce poured over. Broiled Sweetbreads, Maitre d'Hotel Split the sweetbreads into flat slices, dust them with pepper and salt, and rub them well over with flour. Broil the sweetbreads over a clear fire, turning them often and basting with warmed butter. Place one-fourth pound of butter in a saucepan, with one tablespoonful each of water and chopped parsley, the juice of a large lemon and a little cayenne pepper. Place the sweetbreads on a hot dish and garnish them with slices of lemon and sprigs of parsley.
Collops of Sweetbreads with Green Peas Soak four large sweetbreads in warm water to remove all the blood, then blanch them till firm. Cut the sweetbreads into large collops, place them in a fryingpan with some butter and fry over a clear fire, turning when done on one side. When cooked drain the butter off the sweetbreads, put a little glaze in the pan and stir them until well glazed. Arrange the collops in a circle on a hot dish, fill the center with boiled green peas, and serve.
Five variations on one preparation, written for a brigade that already knew how to clean a sweetbread. The braise is the base; everything after it is assembly.
- Which sweetbread"Heart sweetbread" is the round, compact gland, sold as the choicest cut, as distinct from the elongated throat sweetbread. It is often glossed as the pancreas against the thymus, though the two are more properly the thoracic and cervical lobes of the same thymus. Order veal sweetbreads from a butcher; figure one gland per person, so six serves six.
- Soak, blanch, pressThe book assumes the glands arrive already blanched, and only the peas recipe spells it out: soak in several changes of cold or barely warm water until no pink runs out, simmer 10-15 minutes until firm, then cool in ice water and peel off membrane and fat. Pressing them flat under a weighted plate for an hour before braising is not in the book, but it is the step that helps them slice cleanly.
- Larding and fat pork"Lard the upper parts slightly" means threading strips of chilled fatback through the surface with a larding needle — optional now, and a bard of thin fatback laid over the top does much the same. "Fat pork" is unsmoked salt pork or fresh fatback, not bacon; bacon's cure and smoke will take over the dish.
- Buttered paperA cartouche — parchment cut to the pan's diameter, buttered on the underside. It holds moisture against the glands during the oven stage. Modern parchment works exactly as intended; the instruction to replace it in the same position after each basting is not fussiness, it keeps the exposed top from drying.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the range had none. A braise of this size wants 325F, covered, and 40 minutes is about right for pressed glands that have already been blanched. They are done at an internal 160F, firm and springy rather than squeaky.
- White broth and glaze"Strong white broth" is unroasted veal or chicken stock, gelatinous enough to gloss the meat; half a pint is one cup. The "little glaze" in the collops recipe is glace de viande, stock reduced to a syrup — a spoonful of demi-glace or heavily reduced stock does the job.
- The compound saucesMontglas is a salpicon of tongue, truffle, mushroom and foie gras bound with Madeira demi-glace. Colbert is meat glaze mounted with butter, lemon and tarragon. "Bernaise" is bearnaise. Each needs to be made separately; the recipes here are assembly instructions only.
- Paper casesFor Montglas, buttered paper cases mean individual parchment or foil cases set on a tray. The book gives no oven setting; five minutes in a hot oven is enough to warm through, since the sweetbreads are already cooked.
- Maitre d'hotel butterThe butter, water, parsley, lemon and cayenne are to be melted together and poured over; the text omits saying so. Keep the pan below a simmer so the butter stays emulsified rather than breaking into oil.
Oscar Tschirky's book records the Waldorf's kitchen at the turn of the century, when sweetbreads sat near the top of the American restaurant menu rather than at its margins. They were expensive, delicate, fashionably French, and — unlike a steak — proof that a house kept cooks who could handle a gland that spoils within a day or two of slaughter. The garnish names are the standard vocabulary of nineteenth-century French service: Montglas is traditionally traced to the Marquis de Montglas, Pompadour to Louis XV's mistress, Colbert to the minister, and by the 1890s all three had hardened into fixed formulas any classically trained cook would recognize from the word alone. The near-total disappearance of veal sweetbreads from American home cooking after mid-century says more about changes in butchery and appetite than about the dish.